The sound of damp earth striking metal echoed in the absolute silence.
A dull thud.
Definitive.
There was no casket.
There was no body.
At the bottom of the pit dug into the ash and mud of Eryndor, lay nothing but a metal baseball bat—chipped, warped by impacts, and stained with a black blood that would never wash away.
It was all that remained of Nils.
Seven stood at the edge of the pit.
His black wings, immense and heavy, trailed pathetically in the devastated dust.
His face was a blank page—smooth, empty of any visible emotion.
But inside, the very structure of his being continued to fracture.
He had learned the grim truth earlier that morning from the rare sacred texts still left intact.
The Scourges of Hell, monsters of Abezethibou's caliber, did not content themselves with merely destroying flesh or scattering entrails across the pavement.
They devoured the rest.
The soul.
To die beneath the claws of a high-ranking Scourge did not mean passing into the Abode of the Dead to await judgment or reincarnation.
It meant total erasure.
Spiritual annihilation.
Nils no longer existed. Anywhere.
He was not even a ghost wandering the Nexus, nor a murmur in the autumn wind. Just a gaping absence, a black hole violently carved into the fabric of the universe.
Around the makeshift pit, dozens of survivors had gathered.
The remnants of the Legion of the Vestiges. Awake humans, their faces smudged with soot, their clothes in tatters, their eyes hollowed out by three days of uninterrupted butchery.
They hated angels.
A dull, raw anger radiated from their bruised auras.
Thousands of civilians—fathers, mothers, and children—had been cut down, torn apart, and abandoned to the beasts before the armies of Heaven deigned to cross the gates of reality.
Yet none of them uttered a word.
None dared spit their hatred or whisper the slightest insult.
Because a few meters away, standing motionless amidst the rubble, was Michael.
The Primordial Archangel had not drawn his weapon. His arms were crossed over his gleaming armor, and his golden gaze swept over the assembly without stopping.
But his mere physical presence acted as a leaden shroud over the area.
A gravitational anomaly.
Even Nicole Lawyer, whose indomitable courage was the pride of the entire Legion, kept her eyes stubbornly fixed on the ground, her fists clenched tightly enough to draw blood from her nails.
It was not rational fear.
It was the biological survival instinct of an animal facing a cosmic alpha predator. The absolute certainty that the slightest word out of line, the faintest sigh of protest, would be enough for this golden god to atomize the entire square with a simple flick of his wrist.
Then, a tremor broke the stillness of the scene.
A small silhouette stepped forward, stumbling through the liquid mud.
Maya.
Nils's little sister.
She was not crying.
Her gaze was dark, dry, bearing an artificial and chilling maturity for her young age.
It was the look of those from whom the world has torn everything away in a fraction of a second. A look Seven knew all too well.
She stopped right in front of him.
So small, so frail against the Angel of Death and his jet-black feathers.
Her small, trembling fingers reached out and gently tugged at the torn, blackened fabric of Seven's t-shirt.
He lowered his eyes toward her.
Maya stared at him intensely.
She was looking for her brother in him. She was looking for the arrogant high schooler, the adoptive older brother who laughed too loud and promised always to return.
But she only saw a monster of grief shrouded in mist.
Her childish hands reached out and touched the dark feathers of his wings.
She felt the deathly ether radiating from his skin. It was not the corrupted ether of a demon, but a soiled power, weighed down by the putrid regrets and agonies of the dead he had unwittingly summoned through the Abode of the Dead. A spiritual poison gnawing at Seven from the inside.
Touching that polar cold, the mute girl understood.
She understood that the boy before her had survived by becoming something else.
And above all... she understood that her brother would never return.
Reality struck her with the violence of a blade on the scaffold.
Maya collapsed.
No sound escaped her throat, tightly sealed by mutism, but her face contorted into a silent, heart-wrenching scream. Burning tears erupted from her eyes, tracing clear paths down her ash-covered cheeks.
She clung desperately to Seven's legs, her small body wracked with spasms of a pain too heavy for a human to bear.
Seven fell to his knees in the mud in turn.
He wrapped his arms around the little girl.
His great black wings closed heavily around her, forming an opaque dome, a rampart of feathers to isolate her from the sight of this ruined city.
He spoke no words of comfort.
He did not lie to her by saying that time would heal her wounds. Eryndor had proven that time only caused wounds to rot.
He simply rested his chin against her dirty hair, his dark eyes staring fixedly into the void of the pit, and his ether pulsed with a vibration so dark that the air around them grew instantly cold.
Maya shivered against his chest.
Though unable to hear a single sound, the girl felt, engraved in Seven's flesh and energy, a pure, cold, mathematical hatred.
He was making her a promise.
A promise to hunt her brother's killers to the deepest depths of the abyss, and to grant them a death so agonizing that Hell itself would forget its own torments.
***
The hours that followed were a slow, silent, and mournfully contemplative autopsy.
Seven and Liah walked through what had once been Eryndor.
They were not looking for survivors; the Legion's patrols were already handling that.
They walked to look. To imprint the disaster.
The autumn sky—low, heavy, and laden with lead-colored clouds—poured a fine, freezing rain over the spectral city.
The silence was deafening, interrupted only by the lapping of water on broken concrete.
They passed the carcass of their old high school.
The main facade had collapsed inward. The large metal gate where they used to wait for Kael every morning was nothing but a twisted mass of iron, rusted by dried blood.
They walked down the main avenue, passing the bus stop where they used to spend hours cursing the length of classes and the harshness of winter.
In place of the glass shelter, there was only a smoldering crater, blackened by magical explosions.
Every step awakened a ghost.
Every street corner was a childhood memory transformed into a public charnel house.
— Why don't you go home? Seven suddenly asked.
His voice was hoarse, scraped raw by the screams of battle and the silence of the day.
Liah stopped dead in the middle of the cracked sidewalk.
She turned her head eastward, looking into the distance toward the avenues that led to her old residential neighborhood.
Her fingers clenched violently against the gray fabric of her soiled dress.
— I'm afraid of what I'll find, she replied in an abnormally flat voice, devoid of the slightest inflection.
The answer was brief. But it weighed tons with untold truths.
Seven observed her intently from the corner of his eye.
Since he had dragged himself from his makeshift medical bed, a paranoid certainty had taken root within him: something was fundamentally wrong with Liah.
Her attitude remained calm, resilient, almost too perfect for a human who had just witnessed the end of her world.
But it was her ether that betrayed the anomaly.
Her ether had become monstrously dense. A heavy mass floating around her like an invisible gravitational aura.
It was denser than his own, heavier than anything a standard Awakened could endure without their spiritual meridians exploding under the pressure. She was making immense efforts to contain it, to suffocate it deep within her being, but Seven's senses, sharpened by the Underworld, perceived the energy leaks.
Seven decided to say nothing for now. He stored this information away, letting doubt take root in his grief-hardened mind.
— I'll keep going toward the center alone, he said in a detached tone. Go back to the camp with Maya.
Liah stared at him for a moment, her amethyst eyes searching his, then she nodded slowly before turning back.
Seven walked alone for long minutes, plunging into the quarters spared from direct combat but choked by desolation.
His steps eventually led him near the commercial district.
He stopped short at the turn of an alley.
Before him stood the charred ruins of Liah's father's café.
The wooden roof had completely collapsed, crushing the outdoor terrace and the small tables where they sometimes sat after class. The storefront windows were nothing but thousands of shining shards scattered over the asphalt.
Seven advanced, stepping over blackened beams that still smoldered under the fine rain.
He stepped alone into the cold, damp darkness of the gutted building.
The warm aroma of roasted coffee that usually floated here had been permanently replaced by the sickening scent of dried blood and burned stone.
His boots crunched heavily on pieces of glass and broken porcelain.
He bypassed what was left of the central oak counter.
There, in the absolute darkness of the back room, his eyes fell upon a specific spot amid the rubble.
The ambient darkness masked the exact nature of what lay on the ground, but the silhouette of the object—or what it represented—was enough to freeze the blood in his veins.
The Angel of Death stood motionless.
An infinite sadness, mingled with a terrible revelation he still refused to admit, rose along his throat like a bitter poison.
He stood there, planted in the dark, staring at that secret for an entire minute, without moving, without breathing.
Then, he abruptly closed his eyes.
He turned around and walked out of the ruins with a rapid stride, without a backward glance, abandoning the café to its deathly silence.
***
Night fell over Eryndor like an additional shroud.
At the makeshift camp established by the Legion of the Vestiges, the campfires crackled weakly, fed by pieces of furniture salvaged from the debris.
Seven and Liah had found shelter in the remnants of a bourgeois house on the outskirts of the center.
The building had been hit by the shockwave, but its main walls still held. It wasn't luxury, but compared to the makeshift tents in the central square, it certainly felt like it.
The original owners had visibly died in the opening hours of the Symphony of Shadows.
In the kitchen, a wealth of fresh provisions, expensive bottles of wine, and intact pastries were lined up on cracked marble countertops. This family had clearly been preparing for a grand feast. A celebration that had never taken place.
Family photo frames still decorated the hallway leading to the bedrooms. Smiling faces, frozen in the happiness of a distant summer.
Seven walked past without casting a single glance at the photos. Out of guilt? Or perhaps out of a frigid indifference that was beginning to terrify him.
He settled into what remained of the living room, leaning against a wall whose expensive wallpaper hung in tatters, his eyes staring at the empty, dusty beds visible through the open doors.
A thought crossed his mind. A slimy, repulsive, dark thought.
*Perhaps dying during the symphony was a better thing than having to live after it.*
He immediately blamed himself for thinking such a thing when he remembered Maya, but the darkness of his ether only intensified, feeding on his own mental decay.
Liah entered the room silently, her steps causing no creaks on the damaged hardwood floor. She sat cross-legged not far from him, drawing her knees to her chest.
The night wind rushed through the broken window, stirring her dark hair.
— You aren't sleeping, Seven said calmly, without turning his head.
— Neither are you.
— The dead keep me awake.
Liah rested her chin on her knees. Her abnormal ether—that heavy mass she attempted to conceal—pulsed for a brief instant in the dim light of the room.
— The living do too, she replied from a distant, almost ethereal voice.
Seven slowly turned his dark gaze toward her. The darkness of the house accentuated the dark circles beneath the young girl's eyes.
— Do you still hear their voices? Those of the souls of Eryndor?
— Yes.
— Those of the survivors screaming at the camp?
— No.
Seven frowned. The air in the living room suddenly became unbreathable, saturated by an invisible tension.
— Then whose voices are you talking about?
Liah did not blink. Her amethyst eyes lost themselves through the window opening, contemplating the black clouds masking the moon.
— Those who are no longer here.
A cold shiver descended Seven's spine.
There was something deeply unnatural in her voice. This was not the distress of a teenager traumatized by the loss of her loved ones. It was the detached, clinical tone of someone accustomed to rubbing shoulders with the void for centuries.
But before he could ask the question burning his lips, an impulse of pure divine energy shook the foundations of the house.
A golden light, pure and blinding, pierced the exterior darkness.
Below, in the main square, Michael's silhouette radiated. The Archangel deployed his monumental wings, preparing to leave the mortal dimension and return to the heavens.
Seven stood up in a single bound, ignoring the searing pain twisting his torn muscles.
Without a word to Liah, he threw his body forward, deployed his own jet-black wings, and dropped from the floor to land heavily on the concrete of the square, right before the commander of the heavenly armies.
The impact shook the ground, forcing several Legion soldiers guarding the fires to recoil.
Michael did not move a millimeter. His molten gold eyes descended upon Seven with royal coldness.
— I want to come with you, Seven blurted out, his voice trembling with contained rage. Train me.
— Your place is here, among the rubble of this world, young Azrael, Michael replied in a low voice that vibrated through the boy's chest. Your ether is soiled by the regrets and supplications of the dead you recklessly invoked. This is the trap of the Underworld. If you continue to draw from the Abode of the Dead without controlling your soul, this power will destroy you from within before you can even raise your weapon.
Seven took a step forward, completely shedding his former arrogance. He dropped his survivor's ego to keep only his resentment.
— I don't care about the destruction of my being, he hissed through his teeth. You told me I had to fight. Then give me the means to do it. Teach me how to use this power.
Michael eyed him, motionless as a war monument.
— You will never obtain the power you desire in such a short frame of time, young Azrael. The ritual devised by Malakiel is already in motion. The inverted ether spreads with each passing second, colonizing most of the lower city which still remains under the grip of demonic forces.
The Primordial Archangel rustled his golden wings, and the pressure on the square doubled in intensity.
— I am returning to Eden to gather an elite squadron of about three hundred and fifty Archangels, Michael continued. For if an ANATHEMA, one of those ancestral calamities from the First Celestial War, is truly lurking within the shadows of this city... my raw power alone will not suffice for precision. If I must fight here without restraint, I will level all of Eryndor in a single strike, wiping out the beast, the ruins... and every human being still breathing in this region.
Seven froze.
He understood immediately that the Archangel was not bluffing. Michael was no savior; he was an executioner of cosmic scale. If Heaven launched its final assault, Eryndor and its survivors, including Maya and the Legion, would be erased from the map just like the demons.
— Then train me, Seven pleaded, his voice broken but carrying an implacable clarity. Let me become the weapon of precision. Let me infiltrate the zone and put a definitive end to the symphony of shadows before you destroy what is left of my world.
Michael kept silent for long seconds.
His golden eyes read through the lines of Seven's soul. He saw no altruism there, no nobility. He saw only a desire for vengeance so absolute it had become mathematical. An iron will ready to consume its own existence to strike down its target.
A perfect weapon.
A subtle, glacial, and almost imperceptible smile brushed the lips of the Primordial Archangel.
— Very well, Michael decreed, his voice echoing like a thunderclap in the autumn night. You shall come to Eden.
Seven exhaled, believing the negotiation over.
But before he could make a single movement, Michael slowly raised a gold-armored index finger.
His finger did not point at Seven.
It pointed to the shadow of the ruined house just behind him.
— This being shall come as well.
Seven spun around sharply, his brows furrowing.
Liah stood there, motionless on the threshold of the broken door, her fragile silhouette bathed in the Archangel's golden glow.
Michael had not called her "this human." He had said "this being." As if his divine gaze had just pierced through an entity masked beneath a shell of flesh.
Liah remained perfectly still, her impassive face betraying nothing.
Seven wanted to question the Archangel, but Michael raised his right hand. With a sharp gesture, he gripped the void before him and pulled.
Space tore open with a terrifying crack, revealing a gaping rift of pure light amidst the ruins of Eryndor.
***
The journey through the dimensional veil was a silent agony.
They walked inside a tunnel of sterile light, guided by the massive silhouette of Michael.
Through the translucent walls of the rift, Seven could catch glimpses of the world below. The devastation was not yet absolute across the globe, but the Symphony had struck Eryndor and its surrounding territories like a localized apocalypse. He saw valleys of ash, neighboring towns leveled by unseen, titanic entities, and regional skies fractured by crimson tears bleeding inverted ether over the fleeing populations.
The war for survival had begun, and humanity was already losing its foothold.
Then, the spatial distortion came to an end.
The artificial light of the void stabilized, giving way to an absolute, divine, immutable clarity.
Eden.
The first vision of the celestial dimension struck Seven in the plexus with the violence of a meteor.
He had expected a marble military fortress, geometric lines of defense.
What stretched beneath his eyes bypassed the concepts of human logic.
Colossal mountain ranges floated in a sky of absolute purity, connected to each other by cascades of crystalline rivers that poured into the infinite void without ever hitting a bottom.
Above their heads, entire oceans stagnated in weightlessness, reflecting the light of a central sun that did not burn the skin but soothed the mind. Forests of trees with pure gold leaves rippled under an eternal breeze, and thousands of white structures with perfect curves rose toward infinity.
The air was so saturated with pure ether that every breath burned Seven's sick lungs like acid.
It was of a mythological beauty. Of a terrifying perfection.
And it instantly made him want to vomit.
The contrast was too violent. Too obscene.
How could such a paradise of light exist, serene and untouchable, while the children of Eryndor were slaughtered in the mud and Nils's soul was erased from reality in general indifference?
His legs flagellated. He nearly collapsed onto the mother-of-pearl floor.
Liah promptly reached out and firmly gripped his arm to support him. Her fingers were freezing, but her grip transmitted a quiet, unshakable strength.
Without a word, angelic guards with faces masked by visors of light escorted them across suspended pathways to the Gardens of Twilight, located at the extreme periphery of the upper complex.
Michael left them without turning back, throwing them a single imperative command:
— Rest. At dawn, training will break what remains of your weakness.
Night in Eden had nothing in common with that of Earth.
It was an eternal twilight, an immobile shade tinged with deep indigo and shards of silver.
The soft murmur of geometric fountains echoed on the white marble of the Hanging Gardens.
Liah had advanced alone to the edge of the stone terrace. She leaned against the carved stone balustrade, her amethyst eyes staring into the infinite horizon of this celestial kingdom.
Seven had stayed back, concealed in the shadow of a mother-of-pearl pillar.
He observed her in silence.
His mind, though saturated with grief and the poison of the dead's regrets, finally began to connect the clues collected over the past few days.
*Her ether, whose density surpassed the laws of human Awakening.*
*Her ability to distinctly hear the voices of the dead passed to the other side of the veil.*
*Her unreal, almost divine calm amidst the guts and blood of Eryndor.*
*And Michael's phrasing, the sovereign of war, calling her "this being" before the ruins.*
Liah manifested no surprise at the visual miracles of Eden.
Her eyes, which reflected the indigo light of the floating mountains, showed no astonishment, no sacred terror.
They reflected only nostalgia. The heavy nostalgia of someone returning home after a very long exile.
Seven advanced slowly over the smooth marble. His bare feet made no sound, but his black wings brushed softly against the pure air.
He stopped a meter from her, his shadow masking part of the balustrade.
— Tell me something, Seven murmured, his voice blending with the sound of the water.
Liah did not turn her head. She continued to contemplate the luminous void of Eden.
— What? she replied in a tone of crystalline sweetness.
The silence stretched between them, dense, almost palpable. The flow of the suspended cascades seemed to slow under the weight of the tension.
Seven anchored his gaze into the young woman's profile. His eyes, a sharp, electric azure, in violent contrast with his caramel skin and the dark mist of his ether, pierced through the heavy silence.
— Who are you really?
Liah froze instantly. Her ribcage ceased to move for a fraction of a second.
The movement was imperceptible to a normal eye, but the senses of the Angel of Death, calibrated to the slightest pulsations of the soul, perceived it with the sharpness of an alarm signal.
He narrowed his eyes, piercing with his dark gaze through the artifices of the silhouette of her he thought he had known since childhood.
— You're a forgotten soul... aren't you?
The eternal wind of Eden suddenly ceased to blow.